A drone came in low over the parking garage and Kamala caught it with a stretched arm before it cleared the roofline, her fist ballooning to the size of a delivery truck around the thing's chassis. It crumpled between her fingers with a shriek of tearing metal. Eevee was already moving past her, a Shadow Ball catching the next one square in its rotor housing, and Emolga cut a tight loop overhead, static crackling off her cheeks before she let go of a Thunder Wave that fried two more at once.
"Left side!" Kamala's arm was already swinging that way before the words finished leaving her mouth, and Doreen didn't need more than that, tail flicking as she vaulted a burned-out car and went low under a drone's line of fire.
Six of them left. Maybe seven. Kamala had stopped counting exactly somewhere around the third wave. Counting was the only way to pretend this had an end, instead of it going on forever.
She was reaching to grab another one out of the air when the way the drone two streets over was moving made her freeze mid-swing.
It wasn't attacking. It had a man by the collar of his jacket, feet dragging off the pavement, and it wasn't firing at him or crushing him or doing any of the things she'd watched drones do to buildings and cars all night. It was lifting him. Carrying him. The man wasn't even screaming. He'd gone rigid, staring straight ahead like his body had decided screaming wouldn't help.
"Doreen!"
Doreen's head snapped around, and whatever she saw on Kamala's face was enough. She didn't ask. She broke off from the drone in front of her and followed the line of Kamala's pointing arm.
They hit the street at a dead sprint. Kamala's arm was already stretching ahead of her, reaching for the drone's chassis, and she got a grip on it just as it cleared the corner, wrenching it down hard enough that the man dropped the last three feet instead of the twenty he would have. He hit the pavement and rolled, and Kamala didn't have time to check if he was hurt before Eevee tore into the drone's undercarriage and put it down for good.
A block over, someone else wasn't so lucky. Kamala heard it before she saw it, a woman's voice cutting off mid-shout, and by the time she turned, the stretch of street had nothing left on it but a drone banking up and away into the dark with someone small, still struggling, clutched against its frame.
Chasing it wasn't an option, not fast enough to catch it even if she'd tried, and some part of her that was already exhausted enough to be honest with itself knew that.
The man she'd saved was on his hands and knees now, breathing hard. Doreen crouched next to him for half a second, checking he wasn't bleeding out somewhere obvious, and then they were both moving again, because six or seven drones didn't become zero from losing two of them.
By the time the last one went down, Kamala's arms had stopped stretching cleanly. Every extension came slower, cost more, and Eevee was breathing hard between each attack instead of bouncing straight into the next one the way she had an hour ago. Emolga finally missed a landing and skidded across a car hood instead of sticking it.
The street went quiet. Not safe-quiet. Quiet.
Kamala sat down hard on the curb because her legs asked her to and she didn't have a reason to argue. Doreen dropped down next to her a second later, Emolga climbing straight into her lap and going still.
"Well." Doreen let out a breath that wanted to be a laugh and didn't quite make it. "At least nobody can say we lost."
Nobody answered that, not even Doreen, and whatever had been trying to be a joke a second ago drained right back out of her voice.
Doreen stared at nothing in particular. "That's four we got. I don't want to think about how many we didn't."
Kamala pulled her phone out instead of answering, thumb already moving before she'd fully decided to do it, and started running through every contact that mattered. The team channel. Direct lines to two different handlers. Even the general emergency broadcast frequency, on the off chance someone official was still talking on it.
Nothing came back. Not even the automated kind of nothing, a busy signal or a bounce message. Silence, the kind that didn't explain itself.
She tried again anyway and got the same result, then tried once more, if only because trying beat sitting there and accepting it.
Doreen already knew the answer before she asked it.
"Anything?"
"No." Kamala lowered the phone into her lap. "Nothing. Not even an automated thing telling me the network's down. It's just, gone."
Doreen went quiet for a second, which from Doreen was its own kind of answer. Then she scrubbed a hand back through her hair and let out a breath that didn't sound like relief.
"Okay. Okay, so nobody's giving orders or sending backup, and honestly, no clue if the team can even hear us right now." Doreen's eyes found Kamala's. "What do we actually do?"
Kamala had nothing for that either, and she hated that it was already the theme of her night. She'd asked to be trusted with real responsibility weeks ago and gotten told to babysit a city from the sidelines instead, and now the sidelines had turned into this, and nobody was telling her what came next.
Kamala didn't believe it. She said it anyway, because saying anything beat staying silent.
"We could try the tower."
"The tower that's probably not even standing anymore? That tower?"
Fair point.
They sat there long enough for the adrenaline to finish draining out of both of them, long enough that Kamala started noticing how cold the air actually was, how her hands wouldn't quite stop shaking even though the fight had been over for minutes now. Eevee pressed against her side, warm and solid, and that helped more than she wanted to admit.
It was the group jogging past the far end of the block that gave her a reason to hope. Four or five people, moving fast but not panicked, one of them saying a few words to the others that carried far enough for Kamala to catch a piece of it.
"...said Pokémon Home's still standing, they're taking people in..."
The group turned the corner and was gone before Kamala could call after them, but the words stuck. She turned to Doreen, who was already watching her with the same half-hopeful, half-suspicious expression Kamala figured was probably on her own face too.
"You heard that, right?"
"Word for word."
"Is it even true?"
Doreen shrugged, one shoulder, tired instead of careless. "No idea. But it's the first real thing anyone's said tonight instead of just a list of what's on fire."
Kamala turned it over for a second. No confirmation, no source she could actually trust, only a stranger's half-sentence carried on the wind between two burning blocks. It proved nothing on its own, but it was more than she'd had in the last twenty minutes.
She pushed herself up off the curb, legs protesting the whole way, and held a hand out to help Doreen up too. Emolga chittered and climbed back onto her shoulder, and Eevee fell into step against Kamala's leg without needing to be asked.
Kamala was already turning toward whatever direction Pokémon Home actually was.
"Come on. Let's go find out."
***
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